- Balthus, Still Life, 1937

Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance

The node of resonance analysis seems to me flawed because it takes the image from network theory. Receptive as well as resonant nodes imply a mechanical reduction: they are parts of a mechanism, not machines productive of transversal subjects.

Occupy has the power to effect change | Peter Hallward

Peter Hallward’s piece ignores even Judith Butler’s view of a material transformation effected by Occupy – which is at least suggestive – in favour of advocating a conventional protest movement, involving civil disobedience and non-compliance.

The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach

This is where the former analysis actually works, since it points out the difference between Occupy and a protest movement: the former does not Move! Here also the strength in the Cockroaches article is stasis. There is no movement.

What doesn’t happen when we stop? is the question. Not the more familiar: What happens? Or: What happens now that we have stopped here?

So: What or who cannot be excluded? Not: How can I be included?

Which points to Occupy as a simulation. There is an indication, several stories, an anecdote or two, that the Zuccotti Occupation began from an artistic reappropriation of the Tahrir Square Occupation. It was recognisable. People knew how to respond. And there was a sort of romance: maybe we are like Egyptians, fighting an overtly oppressive system.

It involved – and involves still, stillness being all – the putting into play of an aesthetic for which no further instructions were required. Simply occupy! It is this aesthetic phenomenon that the above analyses are trying to reduce to discourse, to analyse, to trace the outlines of, the etiology, the teleology, the origins and ends, and curlicuing, ornamenting out of sheer imaginative will, and failing to analyse, failing even to depict. Because such traditional forms of analysis are afraid of simulation, fakes, the hyperreal, or virtual.

Imagine a serious person finding value in the politically fake! There is an art to writing of such things.

What I would like to point out is that not only is Occupy not a movement, because it does not move, not only is Occupy a simulation, or fake, or play politics (!), but that in the bodies it immoblises it puts its own status – and stasis – at risk.

is history

- this & placarded statements ff. are from here

- Darrel Brannock, Pocket Monkey Meets Scissor-tailed Octohawk, [Artist + Broker]

A line has been crossed: the spectacle of wealth is no longer sufficient reason to keep our seats. We are at war with those on the stage, on the other side of the line, across the carefully regulated, policed and legislated for wealth divide. A line has been crossed in so far as we have been betrayed: we no longer believe in enjoying ourselves to death; we are no longer complacent about watching since we have discovered we can no longer attain to the sort of lives or gain access to the sort of world we see represented before us, everywhere around. Life in the real world has become too expensive. The line is real cost, actual price.

The war is about a threshold we have not crossed but been forced over and now life is insupportable; it is beyond our means. We wage war neither on the images of lives we cannot possess, nor with needs fed on these illusions, but on the injustice concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The compensation for this decrease is found in the multiplication of images of excess, to excess. Here also a threshold: forced to consume advertising, we declare ourselves at war with the authority who gives us to be force-fed, the power that regulates for, not against, the advertiser.

Here again a divide: between greed and fear. We overcome our fear of information, of the fetishes advertising holds up to mesmerise us; we overthrow this combination of the greedy using fear, this combine. We don’t assert a right to what we need, we take it. The war is about the overthrow of every government that allows injustice to be perpetuated as good business.

With entry to deregulated markets (that is markets in whose favour states regulate), with access to docile populations strangled, sociopathic corporations turn to autism, the affliction symptomatic of their affect on individuals in victim societies.

The power of the state lies both in an advertising jingle, a matter of representation, and the permission it gives for us to be made victims, a matter of authority. The war is about rejecting the illusion and claiming the right of authority. It is about representing our wishes to the greedy. It is for an open and egalitarian society.

It is happening everywhere because conditions are similar everywhere, even where histories differ. It is happening in the Middle East. It is happening in Europe and in England. Why isn’t it happening yet in the US?

The war is about rejecting both economics and politics as reasons for victimisation. It is about claiming adequate representation in the overthrow of authority.